1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and a control method thereof, a program, and a storage medium, and more particularly to an information processing apparatus that processes data that is input from peripheral devices, and a method therefor, as well as a program and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years the amount of data that can be stored and managed by personal computers has been increasing rapidly. Processing such as sorting or filtering is performed in order to retrieve desired data from amongst a large amount of data. In most cases such processing is performed using metadata that describes information concerning the relevant data. For example, the metadata includes a storage location of a file name or a file.
Further, GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) that represent the contents of data in a form that is easy to comprehend visually by displaying the data contents in a contracted manner when a list of data is displayed are widely utilized for retrieving desired data. In particular, a reduced image called a thumbnail is used as a GUI when displaying a list of image or dynamic image data or the like.
However, since the data amount of thumbnail is large as it involves image information, in many cases time is required for acquiring thumbnails in comparison to acquiring text information such as metadata. Consequently, a method is known in which in order to reduce the stress of a user that arises while waiting for thumbnails to be displayed, one portion of metadata of the data to be displayed, for example, the file name, is displayed in advance. Thereafter, when a thumbnail is acquired the thumbnail is displayed for the first time.
By using thumbnails that visually represent the contents of data it is possible for a user to ascertain an overview of files displayed in a list. However, since the transfer rate between a client that displays the screen and a server that holds the data varies depending on the transmission line, it is difficult to display thumbnails at a fixed response speed. Therefore, a technique has been proposed that measures the transfer rate at the time of execution and changes the number of data items that are displayed depending on that transfer speed (for example, see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2001-273231).
Furthermore, to alleviate the stress of a user during processing, a technique has been proposed that explicitly shows the state of progress of processing when sending data to or receiving data from a server by displaying on a screen an image that is prepared for each procedure necessary for the sending or receiving (for example, see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2003-30552).
However, even by adopting a configuration in which only metadata is displayed prior to a thumbnail display, no metadata can be displayed in a device in which metadata acquisition is slow and thus the stress of the user cannot be alleviated.
Further, according to the above described prior art, since the number of thumbnail displays is reduced when the transfer speed is slow, all the contents data for which acquisition has been completed can not be displayed. Furthermore, even if the processing contents are displayed to alleviate the stress of a user, the display does not explicitly show which devices the data is being acquired from.